Like most reporters who covered Columbine, I was content to let much about the massacre slip from memory.

Such as bickering over the crosses at Clement Park. The human chain shielding students from journalists. And the debate over whether victim Cassie Bernall really died for God.

So it was with some hesitation that I picked up “Columbine” by Denver author Dave Cullen, touted as “the first complete account of an American tragedy.” And it was with some surprise that he managed to hook me in his first pages.

The book took 10 years of research, financial struggles and self-doubt for Cullen, a former Arthur Andersen consultant who as a closeted high- schooler was the target of homeroom spitballs. I’m happy to report that he hit it out of the ballpark.

In April 1999, he writes, “Littleton was observed beyond all recognition.”

Jefferson County instantly became a symbol of godlessness, bullying and all that’s wrong with Goth culture, video games, school safety, suburbia and the demise of families in general. Not to mention Abercrombie & Fitch.

“Columbine came to embody everything noxious about adolescence in America,” he writes.

Cullen goes on to set the record straight by chronicling the lives of victims, educators and law enforcers through years of investigations, legal maneuvering and recovery.

He takes us to college and even the wedding of Patrick Ireland, the junior who saved himself by flopping out the library window live on national TV.

He walks us through years of depression haunting outwardly peppy principal Frank DeAngelis, including the demise of his marriage.

Cullen takes to task local evangelicals for exploiting the massacre with the folk tale that Bernall was shot for her Christianity. In one of the trickiest tightrope walks I’ve seen by a writer, he debunks the martyr myth while still dignifying the need for Bernall’s religious family to find meaning in her death.

Cullen shows the failure to protect the public from Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both long known by Jefferson County to be violent and criminal. Then he shows, step by tax-funded step, how officials lied about that knowledge. If you lacked respect for Sheriff John Stone before reading the book, you’ll now want an indictment.

Cullen’s finest work is his portrayal of two killers he came to understand as well as if he had carpooled with them to bowling class or tossed pizzas with them at Blackjack’s.

He explains Harris not through the lens of normal teenage mental illness but as a psychopath consumed with contempt for everything from the WB Network to all of us idiots sucking up air on a planet he considered fit only for himself.

“For Eric, Columbine was performance. Homicidal art,” he writes.

Cullen’s read on Klebold in some ways is simpler — as a kid who was deeply lonely and pining for love. But it grew complicated when, over years studying his journals and videotapes, Cullen told me he “absorbed a lot of Dylan and his pain.”

“There were times I got depressed and found myself sympathizing with him,” he admits.

Before you conclude that Cullen’s a nutcase, do read his book. For empathizing with a killer isn’t the same as defending him. Rather, it’s such insight and sensitivity that make his work powerful.

If Columbine was analyzed beyond all recognition in 1999, it has taken a decade finally to hold a mirror to the wounds that still fester there. It turns out that some scabs in fact do need to be picked, but only with Cullen’s brand of honesty, meticulousness and care.

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